Activist group Great Firewall Report spotted the outage, which it said disrupted all traffic to TCP port 443 – the standard port used for carrying HTTPS traffic.
“Between approximately 00:34 and 01:48 (Beijing Time, UTC+8) on August 20, 2025, the Great Firewall of China (GFW) exhibited anomalous behavior by unconditionally injecting forged TCP RST+ACK packets to disrupt all connections on TCP port 443,” the group wrote in a Wednesday post.
That disruption meant Chinese netizens couldn’t reach most websites hosted outside China, which is inconvenient. The incident also blocked other services that rely on port 443, which could be more problematic because many services need to communicate with servers or sources of information outside China for operational reasons. For example, Apple and Tesla use the port to connect to offshore servers that power some of their basic services.
I wonder if this means less cheaters in multiplayer games.
More. I play in oceania and the cheaters are always english speakers.
Edit: the things you get downvoted for here. should’ve checked the instance before I commented.
I play in SEA and see the reverse. I don’t think most China players are connecting to Oceania servers, they’re far more likely to connect to Asian servers since the data centers are usually in Taiwan, Singapore and Japan which are much closer to China.
maybe it’s a different crowd. or a different game. over here the cheaters are all 13 years old australians who think they’re master hacker.
Maybe all 3 of you can come to an agreement somehow?
How many games use HTTPS?
Not HTTPS necessarily, but lots use TLS over 443. If you are sending something like login credentials to an online service, it makes sense for the servers to use what is universally available instead of reinventing the wheel. Also, some games may use a launcher that uses HTTPS if they are web-based in some fashion, or maybe the game will use it for certain kinds of API calls unrelated to actual gameplay.
If you are playing a game that uses a dedicated server (or just isn’t a competitive game at all), then TLS usage is probably unlikely, but those games aren’t lucrative for the account boosting/currency farming that makes cheating so rampant in China anyway.
Even signing up for some games requires you to create an account on their website first.
There’s that game where you made paperclips…
UK govt salivating over this
Yeah they don’t understand this stuff. They don’t even know what a VPN is they’re just angry about it.
Actually doing this would be devastating to the economy, and anyway they still need to justify their actions. They can’t be openly dictatorial just yet.
“You are all pedos if you are against us” is probably what we will get.
The country of Brexit showed how much they care about devastating the economy
No wonder there were so few Chinese sourced hack attempts in my corporate F5 firewall logs last night lol.
it hurt itself in its confusion!
Just testing the big red button is still working. Nothing to see here, no I mean literally nothing to see here!
Someone should post this in one of the tankie instances. Should be some good content for !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works
Hmmmm I should join Piefed.
But… How else will the tankies receive their brainwashing?! Think of the poor propaganda being hurt by this madness!
Chinese government sanctioned groups can and will still access the broader internet.
This is related to China how?
For example, in China the film industry censors LGBT-related films. Filmmakers must resort to finding funds from international investors such as the “Ford Foundations” and or produce through an independent film company.
Good read. Fuck censorship. Fuck the CCP.
Pro tip: Posting in non-relevant places about the controversy you personally find very important - even if you’re right - is counterproductive to the very thing you want changed.
My friend, this post is about China getting cut off from the rest of the word, most likely due to government censorship.
The title of this community is Technology.
It is a PSA about the current steps the US is taking towards similar levels of censorship. This is pretty damn relevant to both the community and the post topic.
I know some people don’t like it, but politics is part of tons of different communities. Even a crafting community would be affected by the current tariffs.
Please refer to my previous comment.
Please refer to deez nuts
Just as a reminder, you are able to block users if you do not like what they are posting.
Cool, but I hate living in an echo chamber, and worry remaining an ignorant dipshit like most people here, and I also don’t mind reading things that hurt my feelings. So, no.
I don’t like to resort to that, but since you’ve suggested it - yeah, I’ll never hear about your concerns again. Thanks! Good job!
It’s not directly related to China, but it’s relevant to the topic at hand
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Anyone know why someone would use port 443 for anything other than https?
HTTPS may be the official designation for the port, but it is the de facto standard port for TLS. Whatever you want to send over TLS, doesn’t really matter.
HTTPS is just HTTP served over TLS (originally SSL).
Step by step, if you were to analyze a web connection over port 443, you would see that the client first negotiates the TCP connection (via three-way handshake), then TLS, and it’s not till after TLS is established that HTTPS is negotiated.
In that way, it’s kinda wrong to say it’s the HTTPS port. It’s really, nowadays, the TLS port. HTTP is just one of many protocols that can ride on top of it, and when we do that, we call it HTTPS.
There’s lots of things that transport using HTTPS that aren’t websites in browsers.
Yeah technically anything can run on any ports, we just like to default certain things.
Ssh for example can work on port 2000 or whatever. Port knocking is fun too.
Oh, it’s not even that some other protocol is operating on 443. It’s that the underlying transport is HTTPS, just for something that’s not a website rendered in a browser by the client. Microsoft, for example, used RPC over HTTPS for Outlook connectivity to Exchange for a hot minute.
Ah gotcha. In this case yeah.
VPNs, DNS over https (DoH), load balancers via DHCP, encrypted remote procedure calls, TCP pipes via gsocket.
I could go on.
To not get blocked by the great firewall
Sometimes mandatory web proxies still allow direct connections to port 443 so as to not break https, which in return means as long as your connection is to port 443, that proxy will pass it through without interfering.
I used to run sshd on port 443 for this reason back when I regularly had to work from client networks.
Pass thoses firewalls and other corporates proxy/VPN/… that block most ports. If what you build is at least partly used where user have internet access, you know this port is open. Even if 22, 8080 and all the others are closed.
Some ISPs block other ports, so if you want to host something, that might be your best option.
Happy cake day!
